COLUMN ONE : Agony for a Campus: Go Co-Ed? : A new wave of women’s schools is debating whether to admit men. For Oakland’s Mills College, and others, the choice may be to adapt or fail.

The elegant bell tower at Mills College survived the earthquakes in 1906 and 1989, chiming with soothing regularity on the leafy campus. The bells still ring at what many educators consider to be the finest women’s college on the West Coast, but some people now hear the tolls as mourning the end of beloved traditions.

Facing declining enrollment and financial worries, Mills’ trustees next month are expected to decide either to admit undergraduate men for the first time in the school’s 138-year history or to begin a strong push for part-time and older women students. Either way, Mills will change a lot, symbolizing the situation of many women’s colleges nationwide.

“We must either become more attractive to a greater number of women or we must admit men,” Mills’ President Mary S. Metz said. The school wants to increase the number of undergraduates from the current 777 to 1,000 without dropping standards. In the mid-1970s, there were more than 900.

The specter of coeducation is causing much debate and anxiety at Mills, a beautiful 135-acre campus that has 5,500 trees and is cut off from the surrounding Oakland neighborhood by a barbed-wire fence.

“It’s a very overwhelming, very emotional issue,” explained Robyn Fisher, student body president, who said most students want Mills to remain a women’s school.

Although it may be of little consolation to those students, Mills is not alone in its dilemma. Over the last 30 years, the number of women’s colleges in the United States has dropped from 298 to 94, according to the Women’s College Coalition, a Washington lobbying organization. Most of those changes--campuses either going co-ed, merging with men’s schools, or closing--took place in the late 1960s and early ‘70s as previously men-only colleges also went co-ed. Such women’s schools as Vassar and Sarah Lawrence in New York state changed at that time.

Now, a second, smaller wave of conversion to coeducation is occurring. Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Goucher in Maryland, Marymount in Virginia and Colby-Sawyer in New Hampshire have admitted men over the last three years. Mills and Chatham College, a 121-year-old school in Pittsburgh, are considering doing so for the fall of 1991.

Other than Mills, only two women’s colleges still exist west of the Rockies: Mount St. Mary’s in Los Angeles and Scripps in Claremont, both of which say they have no plans to change their mission. Mount St. Mary’s is a Catholic school; Mills is nondenominational. And Scripps is part of the Claremont college system, allowing its students to regularly take classes with men.

If Mills goes co-ed, it would be the end of a tradition dating back to the founding of the school as a genteel refuge for daughters of Gold Rush prospectors.

Some students are threatening to transfer and are wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan: “Better Dead Than Co-Ed.” Professors argue about how the presence of men in the classroom might affect teaching and whether the school might actually raise its academic stature nationally by admitting men.

“If we become co-ed like other schools, we will not necessarily be successful,” said Barbara Li Santi, associate professor of math and computer science at Mills for nine years. “I don’t know of students who are beating the doors down now to come to Mills College. To lose our distinction could make it worse.”

Moreover, she and many other teachers at Mills worry that even a small number of men will dominate classroom discussions and campus activities. They cite scholarly research showing that young women at co-ed schools tend to defer to men in intellectual debate while women at single-sex colleges are more likely to graduate and obtain advanced degrees than women at co-ed schools. Words like “nurturing” and “empowering” are used regularly by students, alumni and faculty to describe a Mills education.

Linda Routsong, senior class president at Mills, explained: “I would not like to see Mills College go co-ed because I feel it’s very important in the 20th Century for women to have a place to study without being intimidated in the classroom.”

Some students and teachers contend that before enrolling males, the college should put five years or so of added effort into recruiting female transfer students and older women who are resuming their educations.

The opponents of coeducation point to mixed results among former women’s colleges that have gone co-ed. While some of those institutions show a general pattern of enrollment growth and stronger finances, some have encountered extreme social and academic difficulties.

However, others think a co-ed Mills could carve out a niche as the best small private nondenominational college on the West Coast north of Occidental in Los Angeles and south of Reed in Portland, Ore. Mills, they say, could build on its strong reputation in music, art, dance, English, education and history and expand into new areas such as environmental studies while attracting students who want an intimate campus and much faculty attention.

“We can be a Swarthmore of the West,” said Ted Thomas, a sociology professor at Mills for 26 years, referring to the highly regarded liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Thomas would prefer that Mills remain a women’s college if demographics were running in its favor. But he says switching to coeducation now appears “the least risky option.”

Besides, Thomas added, “intellectual vitality” is at stake. Many classes at Mills have 15 or fewer students, some as few as five. “It’s nice to have small classes, but when some are getting down to four or five (students), it’s too small for a good exchange of ideas,” he said.

The basic problem for women’s colleges is that, according to various surveys, only between 3% and 10% of women who graduate from high school even consider enrolling at a women’s school.

“I think it is difficult to convince 17-year-olds that this is an environment that will educate them better,” said Zina Jacque, Mills’ dean of admissions and financial aid. “Their perception is that it’s like coming to a nunnery.”

(In fact, there are 50 men among the 264 graduate students at Mills and undergraduates can ride a shuttle bus to take courses in the extremely social atmosphere at UC Berkeley. More than a third of Mills’ professors are men.)

Recruiting has been more difficult in the last few years with the decline in the overall college-age population, a trend expected to last until the mid-1990s when children of baby-boomers start to reach college age in large numbers. In California, the situation is especially difficult because of price competition from UC and Cal State. Excluding room and board, tuition and fees at Mills total $12,700 this year, compared to $1,700 for a state resident at a UC campus.

But, according to the Women’s College Coalition, full-time undergraduate enrollment at women’s schools is up 3.6% over five years ago and part-time students have increased significantly.

Meanwhile, such women’s schools as Smith, Mt. Holyoke and Wellesley are doing fine and a few campuses such as Russell Sage College in Troy, N.Y., recently decided to remain single-sex by more aggressively recruiting older women.

“We know (women’s colleges) are viable. We know they can market themselves. We are absolutely confident of that,” said coalition spokesman Peter Mirijanian. “When things like Chatham and Mills happen, it is a distraction we have to deal with. But the day we don’t have a case on the merits is the day we have problems. I don’t think we have those problems.”

However, Robert Zemsky, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania, disagrees. “The sort of question you ask is: Is the conversion of women’s colleges to co-ed going to be fast enough that those who remain single-sex colleges retain a good share of the market?” Zemsky said. “Nobody’s got any data to say the market will go to zero, but it is very difficult marketing.”

In a recent interview, F. Warren Hellman, the prominent San Francisco investment banker who is chairman of Mills’ Board of Trustees, declined to state his position on coeducation in advance of the May 3 meeting when a decision is scheduled to be made. But many on campus believe Hellman is tilted toward going co-ed.

Mills is not in a dire financial crisis, Hellman explained. In fact, its endowment is now about $72 million, a respectable amount for a small school and nearly triple what it was a decade ago. In addition, Mills has had much success in seeking donations to build a new library and to fund scholarships.

But with declining enrollment, Hellman said, the school is dipping into the endowment too much to meet operating costs. Last year’s budget was balanced by eliminating 17 non-teaching jobs. This year, four full-time faculty jobs are to be cut from the teaching staff of 167. Mills also needs $7 million to repair its administration headquarters, a grand Victorian building that was damaged in last October’s earthquake.

“I guess it’s the feeling of the board that we have to make some changes while we are still strong in terms of a substantial endowment, a fine faculty, and providing a fine educational experience, rather than waiting until the college is in very severe financial difficulty,” Hellman said.

His critics contend that Hellman ignores the philosophical benefits to single-sex education. “I keep being beaten about the ears with moral issues,” Hellman said. “But isn’t another kind of moral issue whether you have some unbelievable asset in a jewel of a campus and you under-utilize it? Is it better to have no campus at all? . . . The trustees are trying to act in long-term interests of the college and if students want to get mad at anybody, they should get mad at high school students for not wanting to come to a women’s college.”

No one expects that changing to coeducation would be easy. Zemsky, of the University of Pennsylvania, likened such conversions to “stepping off a six-foot-high diving board, knowing there is a swimming pool below you but not knowing how deep the water is.” Other experts say it takes at least 10 years to work out problems and approach enrollment parity between the sexes.

More than 20 years after going coeducational, women still outnumber men 70% to 30% at Sarah Lawrence, while at Vassar females have a smaller edge, 55% to 45%.

“I don’t think success or failure should be based on those numbers,” said Marilyn Katz, dean of studies and student life at Sarah Lawrence. “You should base it on the experience of the men, and the men here overall have had a good experience. I don’t think we’ve ever been sorry about it.”

Katz, who graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1954, said coeducation has created “a more charged” social atmosphere than when she was a student there. “There’s a low level of spring fever all year long,” she said.

Goucher College near Baltimore began to enroll men two years ago. “I would be lying to tell you the first year was sunshine and roses,” said spokeswoman Judy Phair. “There were some pretty tough times because some women students were unhappy and let the male students know it.” About 30% of current freshmen there are men.

Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., had a court fight with alumni donors angry that the school began to admit men in September, 1988. In an out-of-court settlement, the school returned a total of $127,000 to donors from a $26-million fund-raising campaign. On the positive side, applications to Wheaton reportedly have doubled over the last three years and enrollment has grown 15%.

To accommodate men, who are outnumbered 5 to 1, Wheaton is building a new sports facility and buying longer beds. But the school balked at what administrators jokingly call “the great bathroom question.” Stand-up urinals are not being installed in dormitory bathrooms.

Meanwhile, life at Mills remains tense as the campus awaits the May 3 meeting. Counselors are planning so-called “grief therapy” sessions for students if the trustees vote for coeducation. The alumni office has been trying to defuse anger among potential donors.

A few days ago, on the steps of the tea shop, which is the center of campus social life, student government treasurer Lisa Kosiewicz was selling T-shirts and sweat shirts. “These may soon be a collector’s item,” she explained. On the front of the shirts was the school motto--”Mills College: Not a Girl’s School Without Men, but a Women’s College Without Boys.”

Business was brisk.